How often should I run an AI visibility audit?

Monthly is the practical cadence. AI engines re-read the web on their own schedule and retrieval indexes lag the live web, so changes typically take four to eight weeks to show up. Running the same prompt set once a month captures that movement without chasing daily noise, and it gives you a clean before-and-after line once you start fixing your entity, content and citations.

AI Visibility Audit

What is an AI visibility audit?

Q: What is an AI visibility audit?

An AI visibility audit measures whether AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews — name your business when buyers ask questions in your category. It runs the real buyer-intent prompts through the engines, records whether you are cited, notes which competitors get named in your place, and turns the result into a repeatable score you can track over time. It is the AI-era equivalent of checking where you rank on Google, except the answer is a paragraph that names a handful of companies rather than a list of ten blue links.

Q: How is an AI visibility score calculated?

You define a fixed set of buyer-intent prompts for your category, run each one through the major AI engines, and score how often your business is named and how prominently. A simple, honest version is the share of prompts where you appear at all — for example, cited in 3 of 12 questions is a 25 percent visibility score. Because the prompt set stays constant, re-running it monthly shows a real trend rather than a one-time snapshot.

Q: How much does an AI visibility audit cost?

A basic audit can be free — RankInAnswers runs one at no cost as the first step of working together. Paid tools and agencies price ongoing tracking anywhere from roughly twenty dollars a month for a self-serve monitor to several thousand for a done-for-you program that also fixes what the audit finds. The audit itself is cheap; the value is in acting on it and re-measuring the trend.

Updated July 13, 2026 · RankInAnswers

Short answer: An AI visibility audit measures whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI name your business when buyers ask questions in your category — and, when they don't, exactly who gets cited in your place. It runs a fixed set of real buyer-intent prompts through the engines, records whether you appear, and turns the result into a repeatable 0–100 score you can track month over month. Think of it as your search ranking check for the AI era, except the "results page" is a paragraph that names only a few companies.

Why this matters now

A growing share of buyers no longer start at Google's ten blue links. They ask an assistant "who's the best company for X" and act on the two or three names it gives back. If the model doesn't name you, you're not on page two — you're invisible, and you never see the impression you lost. An AI visibility audit makes that invisible gap measurable so you can decide whether it's worth closing.

What an AI visibility audit actually checks

The real buyer questions

It starts with the exact prompts your buyers type — "best [category] company," "who can help me with [problem]," "[service] near me," and the comparison and alternative queries around them. A good audit fixes this prompt set so every future run is measuring the same thing.

Whether you're named — and how prominently

Each prompt is run through the major answer engines. The audit records whether your business appears at all, whether you're named in the main answer or buried in a source link, and how you're described. Being cited once in twelve questions is a very different position from being named in half of them.

Who gets cited instead of you

The most useful output isn't your score — it's the list of competitors and sources the engine trusts in your place. That tells you which entities the model already understands, and what it would take to become a name it's willing to give.

The score and the trend

All of it rolls up into a single visibility score. Because the prompt set is fixed, re-running it monthly turns a one-time snapshot into a trend line — the only honest way to prove whether anything you change is actually landing. See how to track your AI search visibility for the full method.

How the score works

The simplest honest version is a share-of-voice figure: of the prompts in your set, how many name your business? Cited in 3 of 12 buyer questions is a 25 percent visibility score. More detailed versions weight prominence (named in the answer vs. only a footnote source) and sentiment (how you're described). What matters is consistency — the same prompts, the same engines, month after month — so the number means something when you compare it later.

How to run one yourself

Write down the 10–15 questions a buyer would actually ask before choosing someone like you.
Run each through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview, in a clean session.
For each answer, note: were you named? who was named instead? how were you (or they) described?
Score the share of prompts that name you, and save the competitor list.
Repeat monthly. The gap between runs is where the real signal lives.

We run this on ourselves in public — see our live proof report tracking our own score from zero upward — because a provider who won't show their own before-and-after isn't measuring, they're guessing.

Audit, then act

An audit only tells you where you stand. Moving the number comes from the inputs engines actually read: a clear, consistent entity, answer-ready pages, structured data, and genuine third-party mentions. That whole discipline has a name — generative engine optimization (GEO) — and our full walkthrough of the work is in how to get cited by ChatGPT. The audit is the before picture; the score six weeks later is the proof.

Frequently asked questions

What is an AI visibility audit?

A measurement of whether AI answer engines name your business when buyers ask questions in your category, scored and tracked over time, with a list of who gets cited in your place.

How is an AI visibility score calculated?

Run a fixed set of buyer-intent prompts through the engines and score the share where you're named (optionally weighting prominence and sentiment). Keeping the prompt set constant is what makes the trend meaningful.

How much does an AI visibility audit cost?

A basic audit can be free — we run one at no cost as the first step. Ongoing tracking ranges from about $20/month for a self-serve monitor to several thousand for done-for-you programs that also fix what the audit finds.

How often should I run one?

Monthly. Engines re-read the web on their own schedule, so changes take roughly four to eight weeks to surface; a monthly run captures that without chasing daily noise.

Get your free AI Visibility Audit

We'll run the questions your buyers ask through the major engines and show you your score — and exactly who's getting cited in your place.

Request the free audit

RankInAnswers measures the inputs that drive AI citations and reports the trend every month. We never guarantee what an AI engine will say — no honest provider can.